The demise of Asma Jahangir is a dead loss for a ravaged subcontinent. Hers was a gentle, but heretic craft: speaking up for humanity, and humanism, in the face of columns of people who would rather die and kill for the nation. To speak empathically for the flesh and blood—instead of an abstraction made concrete—is a trickier job than one may imagine.
Firstly, ‘human rights’ is not a learned skill in the ordinary sense, like radiology or carpentry or quantitative economics. People and societies routinely feel the need for the latter type of professional—for mundane needs, for higher-order transactions, during medical crises. It’s not often that individuals or groups find themselves in crises where they need to look up for the human rights practitioner. If they do, it might already be too late anyway. (Forget for the time being the frequency of systematic human rights violations in the world.) So these practitioners occupy a grey zone in modern societies.
They are not much loved, Asma was an exception. In mainstream discourse, she came up as someone talking inconvenient truth to power, often serving a transnational ideal. In highly charged, ideologised nation-states like India and Pakistan, the risk is higher. But she was capable of something unspeakable: treating a human being as a human being! Without qualifiers from history, geography and politics. Moved by ideals not confined to the outlines of the nation’s map. Beyond armed insurrectionists, no greater enemy of the state exists for us than those who try to ensure that certain things about human life can be held inviolable. And that modern polities allow for no ‘state of exemption’ whereby to suspend civil liberties.
As a mark of honour to Asma, those filled with loathing of her ilk must do a thought experiment: if Indian human rights activists are pro-Pakistan, would Pakistani human rights activists be anti-Pakistan? Could there be something more at play here? Basic human morality, for instance? Which, if violated, render our species as a whole suspect.